My name is Senja Mahinić. I
have been a journalist for the Klix.ba portal for more than two and a half
years. I am a historian, and I previously worked in education, never in
journalism. The focus of my articles are political processes in Bosnia and
Herzegovina and the surrounding region.
To be specific, I can only
speak about the attacks and pressures on the Klix.ba portal from my personal
perspective, and not on behalf of the collective or the portal itself.
Because of my articles, I
experienced the greatest pressure and a series of attacks from the President of
the NiP Elmedin Konaković, who in the meantime was appointed Minister of
Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It would take too much time to
explain in detail what Konaković did not like about my analytical articles, but
the bottom line is that based on the messages he sent to the public and his
political activity during the time when negotiations on electoral and
constitutional reform were being held in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I concluded
that he is close to Croatia and HDZ BiH. In other words, the bottom line is
that his approach harms the interests of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Konaković was
a direct participant in the negotiations on the electoral reform, which were
conducted from approximately October 2021 until March 2022.
In order to discredit my work and me personally, he used private media, but he also wrote on social networks (Facebook and Twitter).
Such attacks ranged from
direct accusations that I was writing on the instructions of his political
opponents, using members of my own family to deal with me, reaching all the way
to accusations that I, along with several other colleagues, was responsible for
anonymous threats directed at him on social networks.
He claimed that I am a
"mercenary of the regime", that I present lies in my articles every
day, that I manage Internet propagandists (bots) who called him a traitor or
wrote vile and morbid messages about his family members, that his wife is
verbally attacked in the street because of my writing , that he could be
liquidated like the former Prime Minister of Serbia, Zoran Đinđić, because of
the lynching atmosphere that I allegedly created.
That was not the only way
Konaković dealt with me. He wrote privately to my editor-in-chief and the
owners of the portal, trying to threaten my position with the employer. When
that failed, public attacks began, which lasted continuously for a year, from
March 2022 to March 2023.
